King’s College London invites applications for one funded, three-year PhD in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, in association with the project Sacred Secular. Religion and secularity in French and German literature of the 12th century/Religiöses Säkulares in französischen und deutschen Texten des 12. Jahrhunderts. It is generously supported by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung.

The PhD studentship is available for two years in the first instance. Funding for a third year is dependent on an evaluation by the funding body in the first year of the project. It is envisaged that the student will commence on 1 October 2023. The studentship will cover full programme tuition fees at either home or international rate. There is also an annual stipend set at £19,688 (the standard AHRC rate).

The PhD project associated with this studentship will focus on the ways in which the fluid categories of the religious, sacred and secular are manifested or ‘embodied’ in non-human things. Potential candidates are invited to propose their own projects within this framework, but it is envisaged that they will engage with the question of the (religious) agency of things in narrative texts. The project will be supervised by Dr Sarah Bowden and must draw at least partly on German-language material, but a comparative approach is encouraged. The successful candidate will be able to benefit from joint or second supervision from another member of staff at King’s, depending on expertise and availability.

The Sacred Secular Project

The Sacred Secular/Religiöses Säkulares project, funded by the Thyssen Foundation, is based at King’s College London and the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, led by Dr Sarah Bowden and Prof. Dr. Susanne Friede.

This project will interrogate the categories of ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ and investigate literary production in a time of religious and social change. At its heart is a comparative investigation of how twelfth-century narrative works tackle religious content, practices and meta-narratives, which will allow us to open up new perspectives on the techniques, functions and challenges of vernacular literature.

The Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at King’s College London

The PhD student will be registered at King’s College London. They will be supervised by Dr Sarah Bowden, with second supervision provided by another member of staff at King’s as appropriate. They will also be able to draw on the expertise of the Bochum PI, Prof. Dr. Susanne Friede.

The Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at King’s responds to the crucial importance of languages, literature and cross-cultural comparison in knowing and engaging with the world in which we live and which we want to shape. It specializes in the interdisciplinary fields of comparative and world literature, and modern languages, engaging with a wide range of historical periods. King’s College London is also one of the leading centres in the UK for Medieval Studies, with a large concentration of scholars working on medieval literature and languages, history, palaeography and manuscript studies, music, history and theology.

Application Deadline: 31 March 2023

More details on the role are available here.